Maker of Patterns

by Freeman Dyson

  The next showpiece was a Miners’ Hospital at Gelsenkirchen. It is situated on a hill overlooking the town and the mines where the patients work, and is devoted entirely to the treatment of injured and sick miners. It really is a dream of what a hospital should be; a modern building, covered with creepers; all the wards facing south and overlooking gardens, with beyond a wide view of the Ruhr valley and the hills on the other side; most of the wards very small, holding two, three, or four beds, and with pictures on the walls; a large flat roof on top for sun-bathing; and a nurses’ hostel in the same style alongside. The only snag that we could see is that the place is small; much too small to cope with more than a small fraction of the miners of the Ruhr district, even if you add to it another larger hospital in the same style which exists at Hamm.

  After the hospital, we went to see a place called the Volksmuseum at Kettwig, where there is a collection of pictures, and we had tea. Among the pictures were some of Van Gogh’s which one sees almost ad nauseam in small reproductions in England; the originals are very fine. After tea we began the drive home and should have been home earlier but for a burst tyre which gave us a pleasant opportunity to get out of the bus and watch the sun set over the Ruhr valley in the cool of the evening.

  During the day we drove through Essen, Dortmund and the other most heavily bombed towns, and crossed the Ruhr valley from end to end. On the whole, it was much as I expected; the other English people were very surprised to find what a lot of open country, and very beautiful country, there is even in the Ruhr valley; the river Ruhr, where we crossed it, is a most peaceful-looking stream, winding its way over its stony bed, and sprinkled with bathers and paddling children. To me, the appearance of Essen and Dortmund came as rather a relief; I suppose I have had such a bad conscience about my Bomber Command days that I have imagined these places to be worse than they actually are. The towns are, of course, terribly destroyed, but not worse than Münster; and there is still an enormous number of modern pleasant-looking houses intact round the edges. Also, the population may be miserable, but it does not look miserable; in fact, it seemed to be wandering about the streets as good-humouredly as it does in England. No doubt the fine weather helped.

  Last night we had a show in the town hall, a performance of Ein Spiel von Tod und Liebe, translated from the French of Romain Rolland, by the university dramatic club. It is a play about the French Revolution, very romantic and stirring. Fortunately I was near the front and could hear well, understood most of it, and enjoyed it very much. The show was given to raise money for the Ostflüchtlings-Studenten; there are a lot of these here, and they certainly are having a bad time; they are probably the hardest problem of all for this zone at present.

  The Ostflüchtlingen were the millions of Germans who were expelled from their homes in the parts of Germany that were transferred to Poland and the Soviet Union at the end of the war. The Germans and the occupying powers did a remarkable job resettling these people. They never became a permanent refugee population, as the displaced people did in a comparable situation in the Middle East.

  Today I went to the Catholic communion service, which was of a simple and intelligible kind, and we had a most able sermon from the priest in charge. Afterwards I was roped in to a meeting of representatives of various countries to discuss the formation of an international student organisation. This was a most entertaining meeting and revealed the German character to perfection; the moving spirits were all Germans, and they did all the talking; we found that before we could begin to discuss what were to be the functions of the new organisation and its relation to the many such existing organisations, we had to settle the question whether Christ was King of this present World or only the World to come; as this last question provoked a lot of heated discussion, the meeting adjourned after two hours without a vote being taken.

  I am getting on well with the Germans, although I get less opportunity of speaking German now that everyone has got to know that I am English. Particularly well I get on with my roommate; he is Hungarian and so laughs with me at the Germans. With him, there is no need to discuss politics or religion, one can begin to make real friends. The best thing about him is that he is thoroughly cheerful; he lives in two attics in Stuttgart with a young wife, he has got enough coal to see him through the winter, and he does not worry about the future. His only trouble at present seems to be that he is homesick because he has never been so long away from his wife before. Richard Käferbock is his name.

  A month after coming home from Germany, I was on my way to America. The Commonwealth Foundation made all the arrangements for me to travel in style. In their eyes I was not a mere student but an ambassador of goodwill between Britain and America. I was expected to behave like an ambassador and to enjoy the privileges of rank and status. Here is the last letter before my American life begins.

  SEPTEMBER 15, 1947,

  CUNARD WHITE STAR RMS QUEEN ELIZABETH

  Tomorrow at six-thirty a.m. we dock in New York. The trip has been completely uneventful. The Atlantic has been about as lively as the Solent, and the passengers about as sober as a Buxton boardinghouse. The ship is like a good hotel and chugs along merrily at a steady thirty miles an hour. Looking out from the stern over the placid sea, the wake stretches dead straight to the horizon, and it is a very thin and well-behaved wake for so large a ship. The ship is very thin and does not seem particularly large when you are on it. Particularly if you look over the side at the point of the bow or the stern, you could not tell that you weren’t on the Dover-Calais packet boat. I have made friends with two of our party; one is Mark Bonham-Carter, who is going to Chicago; the other, Marcus Cunliffe, is going to Princeton. The three of us spend a lot of time together, eating, drinking, and going to the cinema and hardly speak to anybody else. The days go by pleasantly in this company, and I fill in the gaps with long stretches of War and Peace. Mark is a most interesting fellow and is the tacitly appointed leader of our trio. He talks about almost any subject, usually with a lot of entertaining gossip derived from his many aristocratic friends and relations. He had an exciting war, including six months in a prison camp in Italy and one month walking four hundred miles across country to the Allied lines. He describes the latter adventure as the finest walking tour imaginable.

  All my companions on this trip had distinguished later careers. Mark Bonham-Carter became a member of Parliament and ended his life as Baron Bonham-Carter. Marcus Cunliffe settled in the United States and became a well-known historian. Andrey Vyshinsky was then Soviet delegate at the United Nations and later became foreign minister of the Soviet Union. Trygve Lie was the secretary-general of the United Nations.

  I wish I could tell you more about this boat and its passengers, but I’ve been too lazy and occupied with the comfortable routine of life to find out. Our most distinguished passenger is Mr. Vyshinsky, but he keeps to himself, and not even Mark has any gossip about him. This lack is likely soon to be remedied, for Mark’s first call when he arrives in New York is to visit a friend who is private secretary to Mr. Trygve Lie and lives at the UNO headquarters. It seems that Mark will not waste his time in the States, even if he does not learn much philosophy. England already seems remote, and no doubt will soon seem more so.

  • 4 •

  CORNELL STUDENT

  THE LETTERS in this chapter were all written from Cornell University. I was supported at Cornell by a Commonwealth Fellowship awarded by the Harkness Foundation. When I decided to travel to America, I had the good luck to meet Sir Geoffrey Taylor in Cambridge. Taylor was a famous scientist, expert in fluid dynamics, who had been at Los Alamos during the war. I asked him where I should go to study in America. He said without hesitation, “Cornell. That is where all the bright young people from Los Alamos went after the war.” I knew nothing about Cornell, but I followed his advice.

  The choice of Cornell for my first year as a student in America was lucky in two ways. It was lucky professionally, because I fell by chance into a group of exceptiona
lly bright people at an exceptionally exciting moment when they were attacking exceptionally important problems at the cutting edge of science. It was lucky socially, because I was living in Ithaca, a small town with a friendly atmosphere, where people helped and trusted each other, and I found there the warm welcome for which small-town America was famous. Almost at once I was a member of both communities, the university and the town.

  The Cornell professors who had been at Los Alamos were Hans Bethe, head of the Theoretical Division, Robert Wilson, head of the Experimental Division, and the junior theorists Philip Morrison and Richard Feynman. Members of the British Los Alamos team whom I met at Cornell were Geoffrey Taylor and Rudolf Peierls. Other Los Alamos colleagues who came to Cornell were Viki Weisskopf from MIT and Robert Marshak from the University of Rochester.

  The students with whom I became close friends were Ed Lennox, Leonard Eyges, and Walter Macafee. All three were married. Lennox had acquired three children with his wife Helen, a young widow whose first husband was killed in the war.

  SEPTEMBER 25, 1947

  The work is turning out to be as satisfactory as I had hoped. The system here is suited to my needs, and if I don’t get something done it will be my own fault. The arrangements are so well thought out that I wonder nobody imported them into England. Each graduate student is obliged to nominate a committee consisting of two or more members of the staff. This committee is then required to supervise his work and give him all necessary help. The chairman of the committee belongs to the student’s special field and is responsible for the student’s research work. The other member or members must be chosen from different fields, and their job is to see that the student gets a wider background of knowledge. In my case, the chairman is Bethe, and he has given me a research problem to work on which is very much of the sort that I need. As my secondary subject I have taken (as is usual) experimental physics, and the second member of my committee is Professor Wilson; as a result of this I go to one course of lectures by Wilson on experimental nuclear physics and have two afternoons a week of modern experimental technique in the laboratories. I think this should be very good for me.

  Bethe is an odd figure, large and clumsy with an exceptionally muddy old pair of shoes. He gives the impression of being clever and friendly but rather a caricature of a professor; he was second in command at Los Alamos, so he must be a first-rate organiser as well.

  Hans Bethe was born and raised in Germany, son of a Protestant father and a Jewish mother. His parents were separated before the rise of Hitler. In 1933 he was dismissed from his job in Germany and found a temporary position in England. In 1935 he found a permanent position at Cornell, where he remained for the rest of his life. His father remarried and remained in Germany. After the war, Hans and his father met occasionally but were never close. Hans was loyal to America and his father to Germany.

  OCTOBER 16, 1947

  I am seeing a lot of Bethe, far more than I expected when I arranged this trip. He has given me a lengthy calculation to do which has considerable theoretical interest although it concerns an unobservable phenomenon. I am stimulated to work hard at it by frequent discussions with Bethe and particularly by the feeling that I am on trial. Upon my success in this job will largely depend the amount of pull I shall have when new jobs come along. My calculation is now almost finished and has given a clear answer to the problem. Bethe has six research students whom he looks after in this thorough way. This is a carefully picked bunch. He said at a seminar the other day that he considered the present situation in physics the most exciting there had been since the great days of 1925–30 [when Bethe had been in Munich]; this attitude makes him an ideal disseminator of knowledge and is highly contagious.

  I saw Governor Dewey when he opened a new building here the other day. He is a possible Republican president next year; he was very greasy. The students here are solidly left wing and liked him no more than I did.

  OCTOBER 21, 1947

  Bethe has a father in Frankfurt and so is well informed about the German problem; it spite of the father, he says he would have been willing to use atomic bombs to defeat Germany, so convinced was he of the evil character of the government. He had a lot of firsthand information about the German uranium project; he is scathing over Heisenberg’s claim that the German scientists for humanitarian reasons refrained from concentrating on the bomb problem. The fact, according to Bethe, is that this was true of Hahn, the discoverer of fission, but not of Heisenberg and the others who tried very hard to make the project succeed and failed through lack of assistance from the government. I read the official report on this subject, and it more or less confirms the truth of Bethe’s remarks. The fact that Heisenberg failed to foresee many of the most essential features of the bomb, in particular the importance of plutonium, seems to me important as it makes one less certain about what the Russians may have managed to do.

  Last night I was reading the testimony of Professor [Philip] Morrison before the Senate Atomic Energy Committee; he is one of our leading people here and was one of the team that went to Tinian to supervise the despatch of the bombs and later to Japan to report on their effects. It was a most eloquent and inspiring testimony, he must have a great intensity of conviction on the subject; I hope I shall get to know him before long.

  NOVEMBER 19, 1947

  Just a brief letter before we go off to Rochester. We have every Wednesday a seminar at which somebody talks about some item of research, and from time to time this is made a joint seminar with Rochester University. I am being taken in Feynman’s car, which will be great fun if we survive. Feynman is a man for whom I am developing a considerable admiration; he is the brightest of the young theoreticians here and is the first example I have met of that rare species, the native American scientist. He has developed a private version of the quantum theory, which is generally agreed to be a good piece of work and may be more helpful than the orthodox version for some problems. He is always sizzling with new ideas, most of which are more spectacular than helpful and hardly any of which get very far before some newer inspiration eclipses them. His most valuable contribution to physics is as a sustainer of morale; when he bursts into the room with his latest brain wave and proceeds to expound it with lavish sound effects and waving about of the arms, life at least is not dull.

  Rudolf Peierls became a close friend of Bethe during their student days in Germany. They were both driven out of Germany by Hitler and were together for a while in England. Peierls remained in England when Bethe moved to America and found a permanent position at the University of Birmingham. In Birmingham he became one of the leaders of the British nuclear bomb project. He moved to Los Alamos as a member of the British team in 1943 and worked closely with Bethe on the final design of the Nagasaki bomb. After the war he returned to Birmingham and continued to be heavily involved in international negotiations about nuclear energy and nuclear weapons. Lord Portal was the chief of the postwar British nuclear organization. He had been chief of the Royal Air Force during the war. He was a good administrator and knew how to handle scientists.

  The event of the last week has been a visit from Peierls, who has been over here on government business and stayed two nights with the Bethes before flying home. He gave a formal lecture on Monday about his own work, and has been spending the rest of the time in long discussions with Bethe and the rest of us, at which I learnt a great deal. On Monday night the Bethes gave a party in his honour, to which most of the young theoreticians were invited. When we arrived we were introduced to Henry Bethe, who is now five years old, but he was not at all impressed. The only thing he would say was “I want Dick. You told me Dick was coming,” and finally he had to be sent off to bed, since Dick (alias Feynman) did not materialise. About half an hour later, Feynman burst into the room, just had time to say “so sorry I’m late. Had a brilliant idea just as I was coming over,” and then dashed upstairs to console Henry. Conversation then ceased while the company listened to the joyful sounds above, sometimes taking
the form of a duet and sometimes of a one-man percussion band.

  After this entertainment, Peierls was urged to talk about English affairs and did so with great ability. I found this most enjoyable and decided perhaps I was not so immune as I thought from the common disease of patriotism. Peierls moves a lot on high governmental levels and had a lot to say that I did not know; he stressed that the conversion of industry to export which has been taking place in recent months would hardly begin to produce its worst effects on home supplies till next year; also he said Lord Portal is a great success as controller of atomic energy, as he does not try to interfere with things he does not understand, in contrast to certain people we could mention over here. It was surprising to me how completely Peierls understands, and obviously believes in, the English political system and such complicated phenomena as the monarchy and the House of Lords; he is very firm in his allegiance and also in support of the present government.